Like “A-Tisket, A-Tasket”, if you grew up in the English-speaking world, you are probably familiar with “Ring Around the Rosie”. The version I learned goes:

Ring around the rosie,
Pocket full of posies,
Ashes, ashes,
We all fall down.

…followed by everyone in the room falling on their rumps. (That was hi-lairious to me at a certain young age.)

I remember watching an episode of “Ripley’s Believe It or Not” (with Jack Palance!) sometime in the mid-1980’s, and learning that this seemingly innocent children’s rhyme was apparently some sort of code for the horrors of the bubonic plague. “Rosie” referred to the boils, the posies referred to flowers placed on coffins, falling down referred to death… you know, just exactly the dark, fascinating stuff that sticks in a nerdy kid’s mind.

I remember that episode after all these years.

Too bad it’s bullshit.

Snopes has an amazingly good analysis of why “Ring Around the Rosie” isn’t actually code for the bubonic plague. The biggest key is that the rhyme did not first appear in print until 1881, which is a really long time (read: about five centuries) after the bubonic plague scourged Europe. Printed reference to the bubonic plague interpretation, in turn, first showed up James Leasor’s The Plague and the Firein 1961. If the rhyme really were about the Black Death, you’d think someone would have written such a history down a long time before 1961.

Ring-a-ring-a-roses,
A pocket full of posies;
Hush! Husk! Hush I hush!
We’re all tumbled down.

In fact, variants of the rhyme abound. Wikipedia notes that, “a novel of 1855, The Old Homestead by Ann S. Stephens, describes children playing ‘Ring, ring a rosy’ in New York.” American folklorist William Wells Newell also reported many variants of the rhyme, including one that was known in New Bedford, Massachusetts around 1790:

Ring a ring a Rosie,
A bottle full of posie,
All the girls in our town
Ring for little Josie.

In fact, the Wikipedia article lists a half-dozen variants of the rhyme, including a possible German version from 1796:

Loosely translated: “Ringed, ringed row. We are three of the children, sitting under an elder bush. We all call: Hush, hush, hush! Sit down.”

Less is known about the melody that goes with the rhyme. The version I learned as a kid in 1970’s middle America is pretty close to what is heard in this video, but apparently the melody has transformed vastly over the years and countries.